Against odds, two players from same L.A. school end up in Final Four
SAN ANTONIO — The plan is to meet sometime before their teams face each other in the Final Four. Maybe they will gather in one of the long, drafty corridors inside the Alamodome or off to the side of the raised court.
Somewhere, Austin Hatch and Dylan Boehm intend to take a picture that will serve as more than a memento for the Los Angeles Loyola High coach who has asked his former players to pose together.
The image will also be a reminder of life’s frailties and the unlikely paths that brought two players from the same high school to college basketball’s biggest stage.
Hatch is Michigan’s student assistant and resident inspiration after surviving two plane crashes that effectively ended his playing career.
“Every time I see this dude, I’m like grateful, you know?” Wolverines star forward Moritz Wagner said Thursday.
Boehm is the Cinderella of the Cinderella, a freshman walk-on who enrolled at Loyola Chicago without any assurances of making the team, much less making it this deep in the NCAA tournament with the 11th-seeded Ramblers.
“If everyone in the room’s being honest,” Boehm said, “no one expected to be in the Final Four.”
Hatch and Boehm are here and they’re contributing for teams that will meet in the first national semifinal Saturday afternoon. Hatch has grabbed rebounds during practices and encouraged players. Boehm has simulated Michigan’s Duncan Robinson and Muhammad-Ali Abdur-Rahkman as a member of the scout team.
They were never high school teammates, Hatch completing his senior season at Loyola when Boehm was a freshman on the junior varsity. But Boehm was sitting in the stands at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame High in January 2014 when Hatch made a corner threepointer in his first game back from life-threatening injuries sustained in the second plane crash he survived 2{ years earlier.
“The whole arena went crazy, stormed the court,” Boehm recalled. “We got a technical but that was one of the coolest moments of high school.”
Shooting and dribbling were far down the list of things Hatch had to relearn in 2011 after the second crash in a small plane piloted by his father, Stephen. He sustained neurological damage after suffering head trauma, broken ribs and a punctured lung that prompted doctors to place him in a medically induced coma.
The crash came nine days after Hatch had been offered a scholarship to play basketball for Michigan, his dream school. His father, stepmother and a family dog perished in the crash that came eight years after another crash that claimed his mother, brother and sister.
Hatch survived the first crash only after his father, a doctor who was piloting that plane as well, removed him from the burning wreckage. He said he has no memory of either incident.
“Fortunately,” added Hatch, who was not aboard the Michigan team plane that skidded off the runway in high winds before the Big Ten Conference tournament last season because he travels only occasionally.
Hatch moved from his home in Fort Wayne, Ind., to Pasadena in the summer of 2013 to live with an uncle and enroll at Loyola High for his senior season. He said the move was an attempt to jolt him out of his comfort zone in preparation for college life at Michigan.